Oof! Nice Try Congress – The Downfalls CASE Act and Why We Should be Looking to our Cousins Across the Pond for Guidance in Updating our New Small Claims Intellectual Property Court

Authors

Cori Henris, University of Georgia School of LawFollow

Abstract

The rise in copyright cases in the United States has led Congress to begin thinking about how to make it more accessible for small creators to fight for their rights in court. The current system for copyrights claims to be brought in the Federal system is too time consuming and costly. Leaving many creators with all the rights to protect their creations but no means to do so when they are infringed upon. The proposed CASE Act was supposed to be the solution. It would create a small claims court in the United States and provide for a location for these creators to bring their claims without forcing them to fork out thousands upon thousands of dollars. While this sounds great in theory, it may not have been the idea to fix all the current problems. The downfalls of the CASE Act seem to outweigh its possible benefits. Even if the CASE Act was a move in the right direction, the bill died in the senate in December of 2020 once the Congressional year ended. Congress needs to continue to search for an answer and the United Kingdom’s small claims court system may be it. This note will walk through what the CASE Act proposed to implement and why it is not a good enough answer to this issue, as well as why the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court of the United Kingdom is a better solution to America’s problem.

Recommended Citation

Cori Henris, Oof! Nice Try Congress – The Downfalls CASE Act and Why We Should be Looking to our Cousins Across the Pond for Guidance in Updating our New Small Claims Intellectual Property Court, 29 J. Intell. Prop. L. 175 (2021).
Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/jipl/vol29/iss1/6